Can we come back to the amendment for moment? It is on how the housing association spends the money it gets from selling a house. With the best will in the world, I am afraid that the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, presents a problem. He knows London very well, as do I. The fact is that it is more or less impossible to replace a house sold in, say, Westminster with another house—certainly two houses, but even one house—in Westminster. It is simply impossible to do that in London, and nor is it necessary, because people who have lived in Westminster do not necessarily need to live in Westminster. They can live in Kensington, Surbiton, Lewisham or Bromley for all we know. The distances are not that great.
I do not know whether the noble Lord heard—he probably did—the very interesting evidence given by Philippa Roe, the leader of Westminster Council, at the hearings in the other place. She was saying that it is absolutely impossible to have a like-for-like replacement within a similar London borough. It cannot be done, because of density and because of cost, but you do need to do something in London. Clearly, we would be in favour of something in London, but she was hoping, in her evidence, that some sort of mechanism would be established between, say, a rich central London borough such as Westminster and, I will not say a poor outer London borough such as Lewisham, but another London borough, whereby they could agree a housing policy between them which would make sense by way of some sort of replacement in a cheaper area. They could thereby get very good value for money; they could get not only one but two or three houses for
the price of one sold in Westminster or Kensington. So I think the noble Lord is barking up the wrong tree, if I may say so, in this particular aspect of his amendment, though I agree with what he was saying about tenure.